We will give you the simple steps to disable the UAC here, but also provide you with a bit of information about what it is and why it may be best to leave it on and just deal with the pop-ups as needed.

The User Account Control feature will alert the user to the fact that a program is attempting to run on the system. This is a security feature that greatly helps in the effort to prevent unwanted programs to run without your knowledge. This can be a great layer of defense for your computer. So keep this in mind when you are considering disabling it.

Since many of the discount laptops have Vista or Windows 7 installed on them you may be used to the User Account Control feature unless you have previously been using Windows XP or earlier. For a while there, the really cheap laptops for sale were usually going to have XP installed on them. These days however, many of the laptops under 200 dollars will have Vista or even Windows 7 installed on them. However, one thing that seems to cause new Vista or Windows 7 users a little bit of annoyance is the popup notification that the operating needs your permission to allow a certain application to run for instance. This might be an annoyance, but it is actually a security feature that helps protect your computer.

First UAC Screen

Here are the basic steps to disable or enable the UAC on a computer running Vista. Go to the Control Panel by clicking your Start button in the lower left area of the taskbar. In the dialog box where is says "Start Search" you can type in the word control. This will bring up the ability to select the Control Panel from the Program list. Once you have done that, in the upper right corner of the window you will see the search box. Here type UAC (lower case letters are fine), and you will see that you are presented with the ability to choose whether the User Account Control is set to on or off.

Second UAC Screen

If you want the UAC to be off then simply un-check the box and be prepared to reboot your computer. That is all there is to turning off the UAC on your laptop or desktop computer running Vista.

In Windows 7 you still access the ability to set this on or off through the Control Panel, however you will have a few more choices in between whether it is completely off or if you would prefer to leave it on yet have less of the pop-ups depending on what the programs are doing.

Most people have been using one of these two operating systems for a while now, but if you have been using XP still and you find these pop-ups to be annoying, then you can make the decision of whether you want to go leave them on for the security they offer or not.